by Holly Dunn
On Monday, June 7, 1999, the crew from America’s Most Wanted descended on Lexington. I met producer Anne Garofalo at her downtown hotel for an in-depth interview, accompanied by my sister, Heather, and Detective Sorrell. The production set-up was simple: I sat in a hotel-room chair near a window cloaked in heavy drapes. The only equipment was a camera and microphone. Lighting wasn’t necessary—to mask my identity, my name would be changed and my face and body would be completely blacked out on screen.
The camera was positioned just outside my line of sight, and I told the story as if I were having a one-on-one conversation with Anne. I detailed the moments of my last evening with Chris, choking and tearful as I recounted the terrible things our attacker had said and done.
After our interview finished, Anne excused herself and disappeared into the hotel bathroom for what seemed like quite a while. When she re-emerged, her eyes were red and puffy, but she smiled and played it off as if nothing was wrong. But I could tell that my story had gotten to her.
“It’s okay to cry,” I said.
Anne smiled. “Yeah, but it’s my job; it’s not okay for me.”
“Well, you’re a person after all.”
Anne was exceptionally kind and caring, and I knew I was much more than just a witness who could advance her assignment. Her vulnerability and empathy endeared her to me, to all of us, and we’ve stayed in touch to this day.
We finished filming my interview, but my day with America’s Most Wanted wasn’t over yet.
Chris’s parents, Tom and Ann, and his sister, Elizabeth, were also in town to be part of the upcoming episode, and I was going to meet them in person for the very first time. Now that a suspect in his murder had been named, Chris’s family was making a pilgrimage of sorts to see for themselves the place where he died.
I hadn’t been to the crime scene myself since the night of the attack two years earlier, but I think I was most nervous about meeting the Maiers face to face. We’d been in touch from time to time through letters and phone calls, but I hadn’t wanted to bother them very much. I thought maybe they wouldn’t want to hear what I was going through. I still felt deeply guilty that I survived and Chris did not, and I wondered at times if they would resent me.
When Heather and I pulled up to the area where the crew was waiting, I saw Tom, Ann, and Elizabeth standing a short way off. My stomach fluttered. Walking up to them felt entirely surreal, and I started crying even before we hugged hello. In an instant, they felt like family—as if I had known them forever. Ann and I had on the same shirt, a sleeveless knit, in two different colors, and we were even wearing a similar piece of jewelry with the golden bear from Vail, Colorado. The similarities felt like serendipity—signs and reminders of how this tragedy had bonded us together and kept Chris’s memory close.
We walked across the railroad tracks toward the dense, dark vegetation that nearly blocked our view of the high wooden fence behind it.
“Is this where you were?” Ann asked, gesturing toward the ground.
“Yes, that’s where Chris was lying, and I was over here on his right.”
The Maiers wanted to know where and how everything happened, how Chris was found. Though they each cried quietly at different points in the story, I shifted from the emotion of our first meeting to a more methodical account of the crime as it had unfolded. I was the only person who could offer them this firsthand account of Chris’s last hours. To get through it, I had to shut down all feeling. I had a task and responsibility to offer vital information for a grieving family. I didn’t want to cry or feel too much—in that moment it just would have been too hard.
At the same time, I wanted to give the Maiers some insight into how Chris might have been feeling at the end. Just as I’d felt an overwhelming sense of peace and protection right when things were at their worst, I believed he felt that peace too, and I wanted them to take solace in the thought.
After we toured the scene, we walked back to where the cars were parked.
“Can we look at the photos now?” I asked.
Detective Sorrell leaned against the hood of his car and flipped through a binder, thoughtfully selecting crime scene photos from the case file.
“Okay, here are some you can see,” he said.
For my sake, he chose the ones he believed would be the least upsetting.
Ann, Elizabeth, and I looked at long shots of the railroad tracks, close-ups of the matted grass, and images of Chris in the foliage that the forensic photographer had taken from a few feet away. In one of them, you could see his feet sticking out, surrounded by small yellow placards where the police had cataloged evidence. Detective Sorrell and Tom walked off a little ways from us so Tom could look at the entire suite of pictures from the crime scene. I can’t imagine how seeing these photos made Chris’s family feel. Looking at snapshots of scenes I still remembered all too vividly, I just felt numb.
After about a half hour at the scene, I said goodbye to the Maiers, who remained on-site to film their segment for the show. Detective Sorrell also stayed to be interviewed on camera about the events along the track. Heather and I went back to my apartment so I could rest from the day. I felt completely, utterly drained.
Not long after our meeting on the railroad tracks, I talked to Elizabeth on the phone. She shared more about how much she loved her brother and missed their friendship.
“He described you to Mom and Dad as the ‘girlfriend.’ When he talked to me, he referred to you as the ‘rich girl.’ He was teasing of course. I could tell he really liked you.”
“I had no idea. When did you talk to him last?”
“Right when he got home from Maine. He told me he was home safe, and how much fun he’d had on his trip.”
Elizabeth was silent for a moment. Then she said, “You know, he never really said goodbye. His last words to me were simply, ‘Life is good!’”
I smiled listening to her, because I could totally imagine Chris saying those words. The phrase would come back to me every time I thought of him. For years afterward, his last words to his beloved sister would become a mantra repeated by his closest friends, a flag of solidarity waved between those of us who missed him most.
• • •
Now that we had a suspect, Detective Sorrell was firing on all cylinders—flying to DC for follow-up episodes of America’s Most Wanted and to Houston for meetings with investigators. Ever since our cases had been connected, Detective Sorrell had developed a close working relationship with Texas Ranger Drew Carter. Sergeant Carter had spent a decade with the Texas Highway Patrol, but he’d been a Ranger for only five months when he was assigned to investigate the murder of Dr. Claudia Benton. Detective Sorrell continued to keep me updated on their activities, though he refrained from bombarding me with too much information. Instead, I constantly went online to read the latest news reports on the Railroad Killer’s actions and possible whereabouts. I learned that the day after we filmed our segment for America’s Most Wanted, investigating agencies set up a joint task force that met at the FBI’s Houston office. The FBI, US Marshals, Texas Rangers, Houston police, Kentucky homicide, the entire Union Pacific Railroad security force, and other law enforcement officers from affected jurisdictions came together in a strategic effort they called Operation Train Stop.
Teams of officers—in patrol cars, on foot, in helicopters, on horseback, some with night vision goggles or search dogs—looked everywhere there was a freight train, possible sighting, or promising lead. Just like the initial investigation after our attack in Lexington, the killer’s all-too-generic face seemed to be everywhere. Citizens across the country called in more than eighteen hundred leads. One hundred forty thousand miles of freight rails could take Resendez-Ramirez to almost any town in any state in America. He left plenty of evidence at his crime scenes but little trail to follow as to where he might strike next. The thought of it unnerved me the entire time he remained at large.
There was something both reassuring and terribly frightening
about what had become a national manhunt for the Railroad Killer. For most people, this was a bogeyman who might descend on their towns, break into their homes, and kill them in their sleep. For me, he was someone real and vivid—someone I knew more intimately than I ever should have, someone who had caused me, Chris, and our families immeasurable grief and pain. But my personal experience with him would also prove to be key to finding him and bringing him to justice.
My America’s Most Wanted interview with Anne Garofalo aired the next Saturday, June 12. I was back in Evansville for a visit with my family, who gathered around me to watch the broadcast.
“Last week we warned you it appears we have a serial killer on our hands,” announced host John Walsh, “and now the whole country is on alert. Cops say a killer is riding the rails, and he struck two more times this week.”
My heart dropped. Only a week had gone by and yet two more people were dead.
Resendez-Ramirez had made his way back to Houston where he sexually assaulted and killed a twenty-six-year-old elementary school teacher named Noemi Dominguez. He stole her white Honda Civic and drove it about ninety miles to a small Texas town called Schulenberg, just a short distance from Weimar, where the Sirnics had been murdered. He broke into the home of Josephine Konvicka, a seventy-three-year-old widow and grandmother of six who lived alone. The same pickaxe that killed young Noemi was found embedded in Josephine’s forehead. He killed both these women with the same weapon and on the same day. It seemed his malice knew no bounds.
Noemi and Josephine, like all the other victims, lived right next to a set of railroad tracks. In Josephine’s house, investigators found what they considered to be the killer’s “calling cards,” mementos meant to taunt and mock them: the front page of a local newspaper about the homicides in nearby Weimar, and a toy train he pulled out of the grandmother’s closet.
Fingerprints and DNA later proved the two crimes were connected to the same killer, who had taken off again in Noemi’s car, eventually abandoning it near the international bridge in Del Rio, Texas.
The America’s Most Wanted investigative team recounted the known murders to date and the current status of the investigation, with footage from the task force’s war room back in Houston.
John Walsh appeared on-screen again from their DC studios.
“Police say as many as six people may have been murdered at the hands of Rafael Resendez-Ramirez,” he said, “but only one person survived his assault. In an exclusive interview, she talks to us about the harrowing experience, and how she made it through alive.”
And then there I was—just a voice emanating from a blacked-out figure, protected by shadows. It felt strange to see myself like that, and to hear them call me Sarah. That wasn’t an alias I had chosen—it was my cousin’s name.
“I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t mad,” said “Sarah.” “I wasn’t crying. I never cried. If I was going to die, I wasn’t scared to die.”
“It’s a miracle she’s here to tell this story at all,” said Walsh.
He described how Chris and I had gone for a walk to watch the trains pass by that August night in 1997.
“But instead of a train, police say Chris and Sarah may have come face to face with Rafael Resendez-Ramirez.”
Interjected into Walsh’s narrative were clips from the track-side interview with Detective Sorrell they filmed back in Lexington.
“Christopher was pleading with him not to hurt the female victim,” said Sorrell. “He told Christopher to shut up, but Christopher’s main concerns were over the female he was with.”
Then they cut to another clip from my interview.
“I kept talking to him and saying, ‘Just let us go, we’ll get you anything you want.’ He kept getting angry that I could get my gag off. He kept walking away and coming back. And then,” I paused, trying to speak through tears, “he came over and hit Chris, and it was kind of like a dream. I didn’t really realize what was happening.”
“Chris suffered a fatal blow to his head, but the killer wasn’t finished yet,” said Walsh.
As Walsh continued the story, the screen filled with official photos of the crime scene after our attack. If I hadn’t seen the pictures back when we were filming, the screen shot of Chris’s feet sticking out from the foliage might have been lost on me. Though I understood we were trying to communicate to viewers the seriousness of this crime and the urgency of finding this killer, it unnerved me to witness something so personal, so intimate, broadcast publicly.
In the next clip of my interview, my voice was choked with emotion.
“Then he came over to me and he got on top of me, and I started to kick him, and that’s when he stuck whatever he had in his hand, the screwdriver, in my neck and said ‘Look how easily I could kill you?’ And I just stopped and laid there, and then he raped me.”
Walsh described the long road to connecting our case to the ones in Texas, and one last clip of my interview closed out my portion of the episode.
“All I want is for him to be caught so he can’t do it again,” I said. “And the fact that we have to catch him because we’re connecting other murders that he’s done—makes it worse.”
Tom Maier appeared in the next frame.
“Our worst fear is that someone is going to repeat this over and over again, and do the same to somebody else’s family what they’ve done to us,” he said.
The cameras showed Tom, Ann, and Elizabeth walking arm in arm between the two rails of the train tracks, and then huddled together around the place where Chris had died.
“For the first time ever,” narrated Walsh, “they walked the tracks where Chris walked that night, stood in the thicket where he breathed his last breath, and remembered a young man who had his whole life ahead of him.”
The Maiers stood together in the trees and vines, talking in hushed tones beneath the hot June sun, their eyes lowered toward the ground.
“You just kind of wonder what was going through his head,” said Elizabeth. “I mean, I just can’t imagine.”
“The fear, the rage,” Tom said.
“He’d be twenty-three now.”
“That’s right,” Ann said. “As of yesterday.”
“Chris will never celebrate another birthday,” narrated Walsh, as the Maiers’ segment ended. “The only solace for his family will come when we track down his killer.”
In the next scene, Walsh closed out our segment back at their studios, while Detective Sorrell and Sergeant Carter stood in the background looking at case files.
“We just can’t let anyone else go through what that family and the families of the other victims have gone through,” said Walsh. “The fact that there’s been even one survivor is a miracle. We’ve really gotta stop this punk tonight. We have law enforcement from Texas and Kentucky with us tonight, so let’s see if we can help them out. Take one more good look at his details, and remember: Resendez-Ramirez is not charged with any of these crimes; he’s just a suspect, but there’s plenty of evidence that points right to him, and plenty of reason to think he’ll strike again if we don’t stop him now.”
I later learned that during the airing of that episode, the America’s Most Wanted hotline got the tip that would prove pivotal to the success of Operation Train Stop. The call came from one of Resendez-Ramirez’s cousins who gave investigators the address of his sister, Manuela Maturino Karkiewicz, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
By Monday, June 14, Sergeant Carter, Detective Sorrell, and another investigator were on a plane to see if they could meet with Manuela and establish a rapport. The FBI had secretly found her and threatened her in hopes of forcing her cooperation, but Sergeant Carter took a much gentler approach, offering to answer any questions she might have, and asking if she would help them find her brother. Manuela sensed she could trust this man in the white cowboy hat, and that relationship would be the single most important key to finally catching Resendez-Ramirez.
The day after Sergeant Carter’s initial meeting with Manuela
, her brother was in Illinois, ending the lives of yet another two people.
On June 15, an eighty-year-old retired prison guard named George Morber and his daughter, fifty-one-year-old Carolyn Frederick, were found dead in Gorham, Illinois. Carolyn’s husband, Don, discovered the pair in his father-in-law’s house, just across the lake from his and his wife’s home. His father-in-law, George, had been gagged and tied to a chair, shot through the back of the head with his own twelve-gauge shotgun. Carolyn was beaten in the head with another shotgun so forcefully that the gun stock broke into pieces. Like so many of the female victims, she too was sexually assaulted.
Like he’d done so many times before, the killer made himself a snack and then stole George’s red pickup truck, which was later found about sixty miles south of Gorham. Fingerprints in the truck and at the scene confirmed investigators were still dealing with the same killer, someone they felt was veering even further out of control. The situation was becoming desperate.
On June 21, the FBI added Rafael Resendez-Ramirez to the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, along with a $125,000 reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction. He was entry number 457, right after Osama bin Laden (and shortly before James “Whitey” Bulger). Wanted posters with his mug shots were plastered in store windows across the country inviting people to call in with tips. Around the same time, Texas Rangers and US Marshals were interviewing his relatives in Mexico, while Lexington police and the Louisville FBI were interviewing a family member just outside of Lexington.